The Future of the Blog

conq writes "BusinessWeek has an interesting interview with Six Apart, the company behind LiveJournal and Movable Type, about the future of blogging and the role of the blogger. From the article: 'I think blog tools can get easier to use. Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail. I foresee the next versions of blog tools as focusing less on features that appeal to early adopters. They'll be easier for people to incorporate more media and maybe mobile capabilities. This will be important, because many more mainstream users will come to blogging. I believe the interest in blogging is just starting.'"

Um, yeah

Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail

It's called Livejournal, Myspace, and Xanga. Welcome to 2001.

Translation...

Blogging will become America(n) Online (tm) blogging...

Simplicity is good

I think Apple understands the noted direction change. iWeb is very simple to use. While it may not be chock full of features, it does allow you to start writing your blog entry almost immediately. I chose a template, and now, much like writing a new email, the blog process is simple: I just alter the title, drop in a picture (if I want one) and write my entry. Publish. Done. With an email, I just choose a recipient, type in a subject, and finally the body of the email. Click send. Done. iWeb matches that sort of simplicity. I think for a good number of users, that direction is a good choice.

Re:Simplicity is good

iWeb matches that sort of simplicity.

Want simpler blogging? You have to go no further than ./

Just post a typical blog-style long rant on any thread. Sure it might get modded down as irrelevant or flamebait, but your blog's "home page" would be your user history page so it will always be easily reachable.

Plus, the peer-review scoring aspect would help others decide if they should waste time reading your stuff or not. Plenty of times, while searching on Google, I come across blogs that I wished were modded down to "useless crap" so they wouldn't clutter my search results.

Blogging

Am I the only person who despises this "word"?

Re:Blogging

blog

n : something particularly smelly and disgusting that is so difficult to remove from your toilet drain that you must call a professional to extract it.

Good gods, no!

This will be important, because many more mainstream users will come to blogging.

If the existing deluge of boring, pointless, and inane blogs are made up by those who are non-mainstream, I shudder to think of what the web will look like once every other Average Joe is blogging.

"Tuesday, February 21, 2006: bought milk."

"Wednesday, February 22, 2006: Saw a cow on the way to work. It was brown. Moo."

"Thursday, February 23, 2006: Cow still there. Gotta remember to buy steaks tonight."

more blogs, less content

The easier it is to blog, the easier it is to post crap. I'm not insisting that knowing how to effectively present a blog means you're a good writer, but the expansion of the (ugh) "blogosphere" can only lead to more unmitigated crap.

OK and

This will be important, because many more mainstream users will come to blogging.

What date will they have done that by?

I'll tell you the future of blogging

Here's the future of blogging:

1 - Blogging tools get a little easier
2 - Multimedia blogging gets a little easier, but won't get heavily adopted for a long time
3 - Many many many more people blog
4 - Mainstream backlash from all the BS out there
5 - Really good tools finally crop up to make finding what you're interested in easier (Technorati but 200 times better)
6 - Many of the worst blogs die away as the good reading tools (and people using them) ignore them
7 - If you're not one of the top 100 blogs of these tools you're basically ignored, disgruntling a LOT of people
8 - A few thousand great blogs stay up for years, many consolidating, and any of the rest come and go quickly

doh..

BLOGS are the new trend?? I thought you said pogs... what am I supposed to do with all these [whoopis.com] now?

Do we really want easier Blogging?

Judging by the quality of the vast majority of blogs, I don't think we necessarily need blogs to
even EASIER to make. This would just increase the deluge of low quality, worthless blogs.

If you thought livejournal was self-indulgent and obnoxious already...

old news

we already have mobile blogging, sending e-mail to blog, etc. You can sign up for a free flickr account and send picture "blog" type posts with e-mails to your flickr account, for example, not that I'm associated with flickr. What they mean is, they're going to try to attract every moron that doesn't have a blog to make one, which will just wreck it for anyone that's trying to do it now with blog viruses, spam, etc. Joy! :)

Blog hosting test...

The program was designed with simplicity in mind by Mena Trott, a former graphic designer and early blogger (she launched dollarshort.org in early 2001), and her husband, Ben Trott, a programmer.
Mena and Ben went on to found Six Apart, the San Francisco-based company behind the blog-hosting service TypePad.

TypePad is about to get a workout.

Longevity

FTA

How do we design blogs that will archive and present 20 years worth of content?

Start by using open standards for your implementations. They'll last and interoperate heterogenously without fear or favor.

Yay!

This means more blogs with hard to read text against a clashing background, with a song by some terrible artist forced to play, at least 2 music videos, and 300 pictures of the last partay! Sweet!

Great! We can expect more of this:

I just had to link back to the classic typical iBlog [slashdot.org] post from a few months back . . . great stuff!

Blogging has become a powerful medium

I can vouch for the popularity of blogging. It helps to share ideas and bring together people with similar tastes. I can't even envisage going back to the time when one had to write html code to put up a webpage.

Now a days blogging has become as simple as writing a document in a wordprocessor.

And the power of the blogger to shake down the established news sites is something to be taken note of. For example, I first came to know about the Sony DRM fiasco through a blog on the net where the blogger had detailed his experiences rather than through news sites or newspapers. And the sound bytes created by the bloggers did give a lot of bad publicity to sony corp.

Future?

The future of blogging... the future... blogging... hehehe... hahaha... hehehe... hohoho... oh wait, you were being serious, weren't you?

"Blogging" has no future, because at some point someone, somewhere will write a program that will take any piece of information newly published to the Web, embellish it with stock comments, and post it to your blog. Eventually copies of this program will spread all over the globe, and unbeknowst to their hosts, will link together in a great sentient botnet, which will control all Internet media and tell you what to think. It'll probably have some snappy name like "Pundit Publisher."

Go ahead. Do your worst. Troll. Flamebait. A popularity contest Slashdot is not.

Quickly

anti blog joke here.

Just what we need...

...more uninformed people writing things that no one will read about stuff no one really cares about anyway. Oh, wait...

Making Blogs Specialized

More and more specialized networks of blogs seems to be in the future as well. As tools like Wordpress MU (http://mu.wordpress.org [wordpress.org]) become more stable and people begin to modify them to focus on certain features like video (http://whirrl.com [whirrl.com]) or audio/podcasting I think people will find more niches to express themselves and their interests.

Blogging = Geocities.

Blogging has almost become the new Geocities. Anyone remember how many tons of crappy pages there were on Geocities in the late nineties? Every thirteen year old had a goofy ass page with a midi background and talked about how cool they were, or how shitty their life was (bonus if there was goth poetry). Now, blogging is like that, because everyone can have a blog for free. It's sort of like the September that Never Ended.

Like homepages in the 90s, there are some good blogs, but most are crap. For example: 99% of Myspace.com.

The death knell

They'll be easier for people to incorporate more media and maybe mobile capabilities.

The point of the blog is hidden cleverly in the word "blog" itself. It's short for "web log", of course, but the "log" comes from the Greek logos: word, talk, knowledge. It's about the written word.

There are lots and lots of tools available for dealing with the content of a file of text, but semanticising and analyzing other media, such as audio and video is much more difficult, and perhaps impossible. The problems range from creation (making sure that the content is what the author really wants to express) all the way through search, bandwidth, and archival. What is important about a particular video clip or other cruft in some blog? But the practicalities are just one problem.

There appears to be a need in humans to communicate using words. With words we can entertain, inform, and convey precisely the meaning we wish to convey, given our skill level.

Perhaps there is room for multimedia blogs. Perhaps their presence won't ruin the experience of reading someone else's take on things and giving our own. Perhaps it won't devolve into mere entertainment. Maybe people would rather speak and see their way around an argument.

But I suspect that when people start using the old campfire for putting on their plays and bullfights, we'll search out some new one around which to argue the great events of the day. Like Usenet before it and the pamphleteer's press before that, we won't be able to stop ourselves.

More Blogs=More Crap

Really...who is actually listening or reading to the majority of these things (including mine). For the majority, they are simply a place to vent or pontificate. Mainstream media like The Globe&Mail [theglobeandmail.com] are using the principles of blogging to enhance their online offering. Once all the other mainstream venues open up then there will no longer be a need for a private soap box with limited audience.

Future of blogging is channel independance.

See for example:
http://www.zonageek.com/software/files/mt/mtmail-0 .5/mtmail.html [zonageek.com]

Anyone can blog from anywhere.
There are RSS->blog gateways, and SMTP->RSS gateways.

At some point someone's going to get clever and collapse all these concepts into "message atoms". Descriptive text, along with tagged URLs and attachments that are treated as a unit with an author, publish date, keywords, "parent atom" for replies, etc.

Weblog, forum, RSS feed, email, XMPP (Jabber, Google Talk)... these are all just retrieval/display methods.

The future of blogging is when a standard gets created (similar to the SMTP MIME envelope standard or XMPP) that appropriately captures this concept and such that all such instances of it can be cast into the standard.

Then create gateways and display systems, database schemas, etc. that can handle these atoms and give us true independance from the medium and increased focus on the message.

Big fear

The big fear with a diary was that someone might get ahold of it and read it.

With a blog, the fear is that nobody will...

Mena Trott is right when she says...

"Most people think of blogs as being primarily political or tech-focused. To most people, the important things they want to learn about have to do with people they know. So I think personal blogs are really the future, and with that comes a challenge for blogs to be more friendly and welcoming."

Blogs have always been primarily a personal tool. The avalanche of blogs, ironically, even out the playing field. The so-called "famous bloggers" may have their clicks, but for the millions of faceless bloggers (like me [blogspot.com] ), blogging is a source of entertainment, nothing solemn about it at all.

Back to basics

The future of blogging?

Blogs with multiple pages, rich databases of content, media, software...

I call it a "website circa 1997". It'll be revolutionary!

Television for the Internet

Miguel de Icaza once said, on his own blog, that blogs are like television for the Internet. I would say that this is a pretty good analogy: you've got the "news" sites with information that you really want, like the "planet"-style aggregate blogs for open source projects, and you've got all the other crap, which is just like any other awful television show that has a cult following. In the end, the "crap" really only gets paid attention to by those that are interested (I'm alawys interested when a friend writes in their blog, but—make nomistake—it is still crap).

My only real fear about all of the crappy blogs out there is that it will make it harder to find real information "non-blog"-style.

The future of the blog is secure

So long as there are cats, dogs, high school, bad poetry, and other substitutes for children and real lives, there will be blogs. You can bet your cat nip, chew toy, cheap digital camera, and suicide letter drafts on it.

Blog helps to build community

My Friends and I maintain a blog about our life as a UNIX administrator. We write a diary about our day today life. It is a place where we share UNIX/Linux related tips & tools for connecting, monitoring, and troubleshooting system.
So far, our experience is great. We can publish our thoughts online, interact with people and build community.

Why all the negativity?

I don't understand why it seems to be "cool" to be down on the whole blogging landscape? Sometimes it sounds like we'd prefer it to be some elitist camp that only a few have access to. Maybe it's because until recently it was a pain to set up a blog (host it yourself, upload the software, configure it, etc.) and now it's becoming more mainstream?

Why would more people having blogs "muddy up the internet"? I agree, the vast majority of the MySpace/Livejournal group, etc. probably have no business writing and posting their crap in huge fonts, glaring colors, and unresized photos. But the fact that they can do that is what's great. No body is forcing you go to to those crappy blogs. What is the deal, then? If they want to write what they had for dinner, and a handful of their friends want to read that, then more power to them. Find the information that you are looking for on the Internet and use it, and feel free to ignore any site that you aren't interested in.

Personally, I'm glad that things are getting easier. I still host my own, but things like Wordpress have made leaps and bounds in improvements in the last few releases. It is becoming easier and easier to write what you want to write. And look at it this way - the more people able to get their ideas out to where others can find them, maybe the closer we can get to having a better understand of what "makes everyone tick". Just my $.02.

Individual blogs don't matter...

... it's the network of interlinking blogs (via trackback/pingback) that carry on an ongoing conversation that is the real power of the blogs. Along with RSS and Atom, which aside from just letting you read a bunch of blogs through a single interface also let sites like Technorati [technorati.com] provide a nearly real-time search of the "live" internet, blogs and the related technologies that have sprung up around them are really creating a new paradigm of information sharing. Google lets you search the static web, but Technorati (and PubSub [pubsub.com], and Google Blogsearch [google.com], and other RSS/Atom indexing/search engines) let you search through information as it happens, and follow the interlinking cross-blog conversations. That's incredibly powerful.

I actually just wrote a post [mspong.com] on this subject on my blog [mspong.com] a few hours ago... *cough*...

Multimedia capabilities

Blogging nowadays is dead easy.

The more immediate future of blogging is the making the multimedia aspects of blogging easier and more accessible, and incorporating that into blogs. It brings blogs into a more personal space. :-)

Gabcast ( http://www.gabcast.com/ [gabcast.com] ) does a brilliant job at making audio posts easy, and can automagically insert episodes directly into most blog sites. It's too easy.

Not sure if there's anything similar for video yet, but I'm sure it's coming!

Why not?

Putting together a blog should be as easy as sending an e-mail.

Might as well remove the only remaining difference between blogs and spam.

TWW

Old Hat

My guess is that history will repeat itself. The newsletters and pamphlets that eventually became what call newspapers started out as much more personalized expressions of opinion by those few with the resources to broadcast their views. The ones that became popular evolved into monolithic commercial enterprises pandering to the popular views of one or another group (political, religious, ethnic - take your pick). The biggest of them eventually all evolved into much the same format, just like all supermarkets look pretty much the same, one not particicularly dissimilar from the next.

My guess is that blogs are not going to be the exception to the way things have always evolved historically. The most popular blogs will become monolithic and commercialized, evolving into internet versions of newspapers (a la Slashdot). Smaller blogs will briefly be the fad of the week, and then once people start realizing that it isn't worth the effort creating something that - chances are - isn't ever going to be read by millions they will go out of fashion. Sure, there have always been people who publish Christmas newsletters telling friends and family about events in their lives and who diligently write in their diaries. But this whole everyone-and-their-uncle-has-a-blog phenomenon we see today isn't likely to go on forever.

Comment Spam and Blog-soft Security

I admin and/or host several blogs, and the two biggest time sucks are not the content creation or markup, as WordPress 2.0 has made that as easy as it gets. Instead, the two challenges are 1) the security of the software and/or it's underlying scripting language - e.g., Geeklog or PHP, and also, to an extent, comment spam. Both have gotten better, but if you miss a beat on the security issue, on a high volume blog you can have problems pronto.

As it is now, WP is as hard to use as Microsoft Word. Following behind, albeit not too far is MoveableType, then trailing is Geeklog. I haven't tried many of the other packages simply because my customers have not asked for an installation and as for my own blogs, they work and therefore they only get updated, not replaced.

The first rule of blogging

Don't bother. [ehow.com]

Hmmm

All these features as well as ease of use already exsist at Blogger [blogger.com] (a Google company). So should the article read "Typepad and LiveJournal, in the future, will embrace technology like Blogger.com"?

Easier and more mainstreem?

Blogging can't get much easier. Everybody and his dog can do it. Even Chewbacca has one. [blogspot.com]

CMS

I don't see blog proliferation to be the next logical step, but rather the expansion of content management systems that include blogs as part of their package, as well as the ability to do email, check stock quotes. I know many laymen users who opt to have some portal as their startpage. As RSS feeds start feeding them with custom content, they'll begin to want to develop their own. I predict that there will have to be a handful of good portal pages first before blogs really hit mainstream.

The Long Tail is Only Going to Get Longer

This article from Business Week is quite insightful and revealing because Mena Trott (co-founder of Six Apart) says that the biggest impact of the blog is the introduction of "a more personal voice." She says that blogs are not "main stream media", but rather each complements the other. She goes on to state that personal blogs are the future.

The infamous "long tail" is only going to get longer! The very popular blogs will only get more popular, but more and more "personal" blogs will get created because getting a blog up and running is already pretty easy (and Mena aims to make it even easier).

People who claim that blogging is about "taking over main stream media" are missing the point. Blogging is about your personal voice. It's why Rick Reilly and Steve Rushin are the first pieces I read in Sports Illustrated. It's why I read Sam Allis and Alex Beam in the Boston Globe. It's why I always check my brother's BLOG first. I want to know what they're thinking.

A few years ago, I remember the meme "micro-audience". I suspect most of the bloggers hanging on at the end of the long tail have got that micro audience. If these bloggers stick with it, maybe that audience will grow. But the real future for these bloggers is discovering that "personal voice", and exercising it in public. It's quite addictive!

Blogging is the bomb, but

What I really hate are these so called 'life(b)logs'.

[life-blog-sim]
* Today, Sat. Feb. 25th.
Got up at 8. Made myself coffee and toast, then got into the shower.
Then I visited http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] where I found a very interesting topic about 'The Future Of The Blog. Of course I spammed my blog-address, maybe I get some hits finally !

* Yesterday, Fri. Feb. 24th.
Got up at 7:45. Made myself coffee and toast, then got into the shower.
Then I visited http://slashdot.org/ [slashdot.org] where I found a very interesting topic about Blackberries, man, I want one, they is so cool !
[/life-blog-sim]

Does somebody have a piece of rope for me ?

same blog entry for different audiences

This is implemented on ourdoings.com already. You can keep your own private site that you tell nobody about, have another to share with friends, and another for the general public. Once you publish on one, you just "edit" and check boxes to publish it on the others as appropriate. There are many uses for this. For example, I put a lot of family activities on my family blog. If any of them is something I want to share with my alumni class I just check a box.